


No Sin

by Dinmenel (PurvofPulchritude)



Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall
Genre: Spooky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-13
Updated: 2015-10-13
Packaged: 2018-04-26 07:10:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4995010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PurvofPulchritude/pseuds/Dinmenel





	No Sin

Walking through the tombstones, Mesh and Mog argued so loudly that the vampires tossed in their sleep as they crossed their graves.

            “I just don’t see why we have to come here every day just for some lousy _lizard,”_ Mog whined, gnashing white tusks on her blonde curls.

            “Because she was _murdered_ ,” said Mesh, shaking her fistful of palm-leaved seed pods in her cousin’s face. “Do _you_ want her waking, to come kill the Provyctor with us sleeping across his doorway? This isn’t the stronghold! In human graveyards _they do that._ ”

            “Says you,” said Mog. “Besides, how do you know that it was the Provyctor who murdered her? Just because she was skinned –“

            “He’s a tanner!”

            “So? Wasn’t she his wife?”

            “ _No._ But yes. Her parents sold her to him as an apprentice when she was a kid, just like us. And I heard that he paid the priest to force her to marry him when her time was up, so he could keep her.”

            “Why would he do that? I saw her stuff, all falling out in tatters. She wasn’t a very good tanner.”

            “Because – because!” Mesh shook the seed pods at Mog again as they came up to the Argonian’s still-soft grave mound.

            “They’re not even good flowers,” grumbled Mog as the pocked beans rattled at her in their spiked pods among the leaves.

            “So what! She grew them, where he wouldn’t know about it and take them from her, and lizards only really care about growing things. They’re the only thing that’ll keep Tasha in the ground.”

            The two Orc girls stared at the silent stone, and after a moment even Mog covered her tusks in respect.

            “Right,” said Mesh. “Well. Hope you like these, Tasha, and I miss you, and please don’t come back and accidentally kill us.” With that, she bent down and dug a little hole in the soft mound with her fingers and planted the seeds there, stalks up. With the previous fortnight’s offerings, they made a droopy forest over the Argonian’s grave.

            “How long do we have to do this?”

            “When did you get here?”

            “Umm… the sixth, I think.”

            “And she died the day before that, and it’s the twelfth now, so… another week. Or until we run out of her plants.”

            “Well at least it’s not a whole _month,_ ” said Mog, and flounced away from the tombstone.

            “A month of flowers is worse than a zombie lizard?!” huffed Mesh, turning after her. “What kind of –“

            “There’s a tree on the hill.”

            Mog pointed to the high slope in the center of the graveyard, where a dead tree split the blue sky with its two jagged, drooping limbs.

            “What? But – but that wasn’t _there_ yesterday. Was it?”

            They traded looks. Then they started running over the buried vampires and up the steep hill.

            “Hold – up,” panted Mesh, quickly too hot in the unusual Frostfall warmth.

            “If you weren’t wearing that thing you’d be able to keep up,” yelled Mog, and kept going.

            Mesh rolled her shoulders in her sheepskin coat, pushing the cuffs over the thick black hairs sprouting on the backs of her hands and fingers. It was all right for _her_ , with her almost invisible down instead of the wires clawing through Mesh’s skin more and more as she grew into near-adulthood.

            She pushed her in the back as she reached the top.

            “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t see you there. Maybe –“

            “Waaaaaaagh!”

            She had knocked Mog against the tree – and right into the veiled body standing upright in its hollow, their gloved arms crossed across their chest. The tree was bare of bark, grey and weathered like old boards, and dead twigs hung in bunches from its limbs like limp, bony hands.

            They staggered back in horror, clutching each other. Glass clinked beneath their shoes as they moved. Almost outside of herself, Mesh saw that the hill was covered in shattered glass, save for a happenstance gap in the shape of a question mark.

            “Wee ones!” squealed the body, and the girls screamed. They turned to run, but the corpse was too fast; its bony hands pinched down on their shoulders and dragged them gleefully back to its veiled face.

            “Perfect!” it said. “I know just the thing.” It laid one finger on each of their noses, and then she – it seemed, suddenly, to be a _she_ – whirled away back into the hollow trunk. Rooted to the spot – literally; the tree’s roots had somehow reformed over their feet – Mesh and Mog watched and listened as various clangs, bangs, hammerings, and saw-shriekings echoed from some unseen location within the tree.

            “What – is she _building_ in there?” gasped Mog.

            The body reappeared abruptly, stepping out of the tree from _somewhere_. On second look, she was wearing a black velvet wedding dress and veil; only her wild, dry black hair was uncovered.

            “Here,” she said, and slapped a matchbox into Mesh’s palm. “Give that to _him._ He knows _all_ the prestigious residents and revenants hereabouts.”

            Mesh and Mog only stared, paralyzed with fear. The corpse – or whatever it was – raised the edges of her dress at them like the wings of a giant bat. “Scurry, wee little ghosties! I’ve got pumpkin juice to poison!” And she chased them off the hill, cackling shrilly.

            They didn’t stop running until they were out of the graveyard and back behind Grimvale’s mossy walls, long after the veiled woman’s shattering giggles faded away behind them.

            “Wh-what did she give you?” panted Mog, bent over on her knees beside Mesh.

            Mesh shook her head, breathless. She sat back, holding out the little wooden box.

            “It’s making a sound,” she said. “Listen.”

            Mog bent closer. A faint, infectious ticking came from inside.

            “Open it,” whispered Mog.

            “What if that triggers it?” breathed Mesh. “It could be some Dwarf thing.”

            “Dwarves don’t use wood, stupid. Poppa used to pick comberries in Morrowind and I saw the ruins. Open it.”

            Crouched in the mud and fallen leaves along the hedgerow, Mesh slowly pushed the little box open, ready to throw it away at any moment if something went wrong. But nothing jumped out, or exploded, or anything else – the ticking rhythm just got a bit louder. Together, the girls leaned in to see what was inside.

            A tiny tan spider crouched in the box. Its body was flecked in black splotches, almost like the beans of Tasha’s plants, and it was flicking its sharp limbs together to an unwritten time, ticking the terrible beat.

            “A spider?” gasped Mog. “But that’s –“

            “The Provyctor!” whispered Mesh fiercely, slamming the box closed and yanking her cousin behind the hedgerow. “Get down!”

            A taper of manflesh had just stepped out of a tavern along the road. Their master, Aryn Provyctor, ran his fingers through his bloody, vulpine sideburns as he watched the woman beside him button up her shirt. Mesh and Mog stared through the branches of the hedge.

            “Ain’t no sin to share a bit of skin, Larissa,” he said, leering. Larissa sneered back.

            “Bug off, Aryn, I’m not on duty,” she snapped. “I think you’ve seen quite enough already, for a grievin’ man anyway.” She set off down the street.

            “Ah, but yours is like a soothing balm for mine!” he shouted after her. He stood there, grinning for a few seconds, before turning the other way, toward his tanning yard.

            “Run!” whispered Mesh. “We have to get home _now_. We’re not allowed to leave the yard!”

            The two girls dashed along the hedge through the wet dead leaves, trying their best not to crack sticks or rustle branches, snatching glances past at the Provyctor making his way in parallel on the road. Luckily, he stopped to talk several times on the way, and they were waiting for him among the bloody frames and stinking vats of curative when he stepped through the gate.

            “Well now,” he said, not even looking at them as he ducked into the small tool shed and emerged with a shining, curved skinning knife. “Who’s feeling charitable?”

            He stalked past the pen of pathetic calves, twiddling the blade idly. “Is it you, little Piffin?” he said, flicking a calf’s ear with the tip. “Or is it you, Abelard?” He crouched down in front of the cowering foxes, reflecting light into Abelard’s eyes with the knife. “Who will make a donation today?” he said, springing back to his feet. He dragged the knife along the cage bars of Tasha’s rangy old durzog, Itsy-Bitsy, but he was so old and so starved he could barely flinch.

            “Or what about you, Mesh gro-Mugbug?” he said, looming over her. He lifted her trembling chin with the blade, forcing her to stare into his grinning white face. “Ain’t no sin to share a little skin, boy.”

            With a sob, Mesh jumped backward and fled across the yard and behind the tiny house. The Provyctors’ barreling laughter chased her the whole way.

            Mesh worked invisibly for the rest of the day. She cleaned the house, stacked the firewood, fed the animals, and kept a careful watch on her master as he made her cousin help him slaughter and skin one of the sheep. She darted out of sight at the slightest twitch of his head, her heart loud in her ears, and she plotted.

            At last the sun fell below the crags of Wrothgar, burning the skies a bright cider-stain orange, and the Provyctor hung up his tools and retreated inside, leaving Mog free at last to come find her.

            “Ugh,” Mog heaved as she collapsed against the wood pile. “I am _so hot_. Isn’t this Frostfall? I swear it’s hotter now than it was at noon!”

            “Yeah,” said Mesh. “Umm. Look, thanks for doing all the work with him today. I-“

            “No big deal,” said Mog. “He – well, he was in a good mood.” Probably from terrorizing Mesh, she left out. “But listen, he won’t actually sk- do anything to you, you know? People would be able to tell if he – if he –“

            “If he used my hide for gloves?” said Mesh dryly. “Maybe, but I’d still be dead by that point. And – look, you don’t know everything. I didn’t want to tell you because it’s bad enough not knowing, but – well, long and short of it is that we have to kill him.”

            “What! Why?”

            “Because I think he got a taste for murder with Tasha, and we’ll be next. He’s been – worse, since she died. No, shut up for a minute. You know how he’s famous for his durzog hide? Finest in High Rock and all that. Well, you’ve seen old Itsy-Bitsy, right? His scales are about as ragged and ugly as could be!”

            “I just thought no one knew what it was supposed to be like.”         

            “Well – yeah, but still. Anyway, I was here with Tasha a long time, right? I saw a lot of – things. Used to be that every time we’d tan some durzog, Tasha would have me make some willow mash mud. For Itsy-Bitsy to heal up properly, she said, only I never saw a mark on Itsy-Bitsy… and every time, she’d wear a big pile of rags up under the back of her shirt and move like she was about to die.”

            “So… you think the Provyctor was skinning _her_ instead? But wouldn’t she end up all scarred after the first time?”

            Mesh shook her head. “You don’t know about lizards. They don’t heal like us, with scars. They fix their skin so there’s not even a mark. And I don’t know what happened to make him kill her, but I’ll tell you, she was found completely skinned in an imp cave outside town, and we tanned the biggest batch of ‘durzog’ hide I’ve ever seen the day before you came. Itsy-Bitsy doesn’t even _have_ that much.”

            Mog stared off into the deepening gloom, stuffing her golden curls into her mouth in horror.

            “If that’s true… we’ve got to get out of here, Mesh!”

            Mesh shook her head fiercely. “No. If we just leave, what do you think will happen? They’ll track us down and bring us back, shaming our parents, or he’ll just get some new lizard girl to do the same thing to! We have to put a stop to him, and I know how!” She held out the beat boxing spider. “That lady said to give it to ‘him,’ and that he knows all the important people around here. And Provyctor’s real smarmy with the nobles because of his ‘finest durzog leather in High Rock!’ So all we have to do is throw it in his face and let it bite him!”

            “What!” shouted Mog. “You don’t even know that it could kill him! Even if it did, who do you think would get the blame? These are _Bretons,_ Mesh! They’d hang us _and_ our parents! No, we are not going to try to kill him. We’re going to leave, and we’re going to leave now, and we’re not going to get either skinned _or_ hanged!”

            “You go if you want!” Mesh snapped. “You didn’t know her, it’s easy for you to be a coward! I’m going to make this right!” She turned to stomp toward the house, jerking her oversized coat tighter around her.

            “Oh no!” said Mog. “My parents would un-name me if I let you get yourself hanged. Give me that!”

            She snatched at the box in Mesh’s hand, but the other girl clung to it tightly. They scrabbled over it on the stones behind the house, pushing and shoving to seize the ticking spider… until the box jerked open and the spider flew out on the ground.

            Mesh dove for it, but Mog’s shoe came down first with a solid squish.

            “There,” she sighed. “Now you _have_ to come with me. Come on, let’s –“ But she cut off abruptly, her throat seized up by what she saw.

            A pale, twitching mass flowed from beneath her shoe across the stones, spreading spasmodically, a living liquid, bound to an unholy beat.

            “You fool!” whispered Mesh. “It was carrying _babies!”_

            They scrambled backwards, but the legion of orphaned spiders spread too quickly for them to avoid, streaming away in every direction, dispersing into tiny, pale patches of nearly silent rhythm. Most parted around them, heading around the house to either side, but one came straight toward them. They tried to scoot away, but it was too swift, darting to them – and then between and beyond.

            For a moment they stared at each other, panting. Then they tore around toward the house, pressing their faces against the back window.

            The Provyctor sat at his kitchen table, slicing a bloody haunch of venison into paper-thin slices. Candles lit his face against the stingy dark of the house; all bog beacon orange and inflamed red.

            “There,” whispered Mog. “By his ear.”

            The spider crawled rapidly across the long bristles of his sideburns, legs twitching and ticking… and then vanished into his ear.

            “It’s – it’s gone into his head!” said Mesh. Mog seized her arm.

            For a second, nothing changed. The Provyctor chewed disgustingly, swallowed with an audible gulp. Then his head twitched to the side. He frowned. His head gave another twitch, and he clapped his hands over his ears, but it did no good – it jerked back and forth on his neck uncontrollably, like a Nord trying to dance. And then it spread. His ribcage popped to the side, then forward and back, precise to some inaudible beat, to the spider flicking its legs inside his head. His arms swept around, knocking his plate to the floor, and his kicking legs knocked the table on its side. And with a choked cry of terror, the Provyctor began to dance out of his house.

            Without a word, Mesh and Mog dashed around the side of the house and through the yard after the Provyctor. They cut short at the gate – their master was jiving down the road through the pooled amber lamplight. All along, doors were bursting open and vomiting out madly spasming men, women, and enbies, possessed by tiny spiderlings. Their bodies flung themselves against the walls and the ground, thrashing in the crackling autumn leaves as they fought the beat boxing in their brains. And then they seemed to synchronize, to stop fighting it, and with a collective howl of laughter they formed up in the streets into long patterned lines. They moved as one, sliding, shaking scarecrow limbs, lunging side to side, twitching rickety hips as though they had rehearsed a hundred moons. And in the gathering dusk they boogied down to Grimvale’s graveyard. As though entranced, the two girls followed.

            The giggling beat of some haunting, grinding, shrieking, growling imitation of music washed over them as they approached, borne on the same beat that animated the town of Grimvale through the thousand spiders twitching in their skulls. Atop the hill, some strange parchment had been stretched across the hollow of the dead grey tree, and two scamps beat out the rhythm upon it with the squealing bodies of blackened imps. The lady they had awoken – the witch – whirled before them around an enormous cauldron, her wedding dress a curl of smoke as great clouds of orange steam boiled up to the rising moon above. Other imps floated above the tombstones and mausoleums, embroiled in blue flames and dancing jigs of torture. To one side a demon flesh orchestra plucked and rubbed and ripped the music from the living organs and guts of their fellows.

            “Ah!” yelled the witch when she caught sight of the dancing village. “Our guests have begun to arrive! Orchestra, the Hurly Burly Hurdle, please!” She clapped, and the demons switched to a new tune, leaping and discordant, and the villagers jumped among the graves and into the steps without a hitch, spinning and whirling, tossing and catching each other with gleeful abandon. Everyone was there, of pauper and prince; Haras the Hunter, the Straked White, the Umpteenth Chancer, Karol da Goth, Mister Mojo, Priestman the Scourge of Cussing, Eis Vuur His Wardenship, Taoiseach the Scholar of Socks, the Seasonal Tower. The heat rose, and they sweated as they danced, shining and flushed. The orchestra hit a high note, and a dozen fists thrust up through the earth. The grin-faced Lyrezi rose right up into the throng, their fangs glinting on fleek, taking partners without missing a beat. Mesh and Mog huddled by the gateway, transfixed. A horrendous hooting echoed through the air and the wild Wroth Witches swooped down from the winds on their whistling wand-spears and shimmied into the mix, shaking their shoulders and winking at the veiled witch above. Behind them flapped in a gaggle of giant black bats who immediately cut in to the dances of the most beautiful enbies, more dashing in leather than the Lyrezi in their finery.

            The song went on, ever faster, ever more furious, and the heat broiled out from the witch’s toxic cauldron. It was too much – before long they were tearing at each other’s sweat-soaked clothes and dancing nude in the frothing night, a slick suffusion of flesh. Mog clapped her hands over Mesh’s eyes, but Mesh pulled them down roughly.

            The moon was tangled in the tree’s branches, cackling bright, but suddenly it vanished to black, eclipsed by a greater body as the Necromancer’s Moon loomed over the graveyard – and stepped down beside the veiled witch.

            “I got your invitation,” Mannimarco shouted over the crazed din, and then glanced at the scamps beating willy nilly at the tree. “A doom drum?” he said, but the witch just nodded vigorously and spun away around her cauldron. So the God of Worms shrugged, and salsaed down the hill. Skeletons and zombies pushed their way up in his wake, linking arms and kicking up skirts of dirt as he led them in a snake around the yard.

            The girls could not seem to move. They could only watch as the dance went on and on, and the heat rose higher and higher until –

            The witch shrieked, jerked to a stop. “Take it off!” she screamed, and ripped away her satin wedding dress and veil from the bare bones beneath. “Everybody take it off!”

            The dancers howled, and rushed for the tree. They tore at their bodies until they sweated the blood the heat demanded, and hung their stripped skins across the tree, peeled muscles free to drape its bare limbs until they were but streaked meaty skeletons. And then they danced, danced, danced around in their bones.

            And then, finally, the girls saw Tasha, dancing in the four arms of a giant demon, the only Argonian skeleton in the whole unholy whirligig, covered in the striated seeds they had planted above her. They could do nothing, even as fifteen other demons strode past them through the gate, of eyes and tentacles, scales and stars. They joined the dance, and it wound tighter and tighter around the skin-draped tree, on and on the clatter of raw jaw bones in the night.

            Until – Grimvale’s clock struck the soul’s midnight, three a.m. on a witches’ festival morn, and the dead tree flexed its limbs, opening its twigs like bony fingers webbed by donated skin, its dead wood clad in chimeric flesh. The shards of glass scattered around its roots flew together to fill the hollow with crystal, glowing a lurid green against the orange of the boiling brew. Black silk strands glinted in its light between the branches and a thousand thousand eyelids flicked open ocular lenticels on its sanguine trunk.

            The witch shrieked with glee, and pressed her bare skull against a suited octopus’ tentacled face before streaking back up the hill. She threw her arms around its trunk, and suddenly she was alive, clothed in sweaty amber flesh. She hopped around the tree, ecstatically nude, and then turned to the skeletal dance floor.

            “My friends!” she shouted. “May you all lead tasty, wicked lives! For the sin – the sin is the life!”

            And with that, the tree shot into the black sky, the witch clinging to its side, waving and wheezing with laughter. The _boom_ of its departure swept the skeletons and the watching Orc girls off their feet, knocking them all into exhausted slumber.

           

 

            When they woke, groggy in the bitter cold mist of Frostfall, everyone had skin again. Mesh and Mog seized each other in a fierce hug as soon as they were awake, crying harshly.

            “I’m so glad we’re ok,” Mesh gasped.

            “Me too,” said Mog. “I can’t believe that – that _they_ are ok, too!”

            It was then that the screams started.

            They poked their heads around the gate, and found that, although everyone wore _someone’s_ skin, few wore their _own…_ and plenty wore those of souls who had long moldered in the wet dark of the graveyard’s apartments.

As the villagers of Grimvale realized what had happened, they began to shriek and tear at themselves as fiercely as they had a few hours before in the grips of the witch’s spell, watering the ground with fruitless blood.

The loudest, most desperate howl rose from the throat of the Provyctor. His wife, Tasha, lay dead on her grave beside him… his pale, human skin over her bones, and the few scraps left of her scales covering mere patches of his bloody musculature. As the girls looked on, he ripped at himself, at the few patches of her perfect hide, not even scratching the scales but shredding his bare layer of tender fat, then fell to the ground beside her. His exposed eyes spotted the beans in their spiked pods scattered around her, the seeds they had planted on her grave, and knew them for what they were: castor, one of the most poisonous things in High Rock. He snatched them up and shoved them in his mouth, spikes and all, with clods of grass and dirt, chewing frantically, sealing a frothy doom.

The girls turned away. Mesh swallowed hard.

“Well,” she said. “I guess – I guess he got what he deserved. And we can – we’re alright, so – what’s the matter, Mog?”

Mog was staring at Mesh’s face, not breathing, riveted with revulsion. Mesh brushed at her hair, glancing at her hands – smooth, hairless. Slowly, she looked over at Mog’s – they were thick with wiry black hairs along the forearms and fingers. It was only then that she realized that the hair hanging by her eyes was blonde, and curly as wool.

“Ain’t… no sin?” she said, and began to laugh as Mog screamed.


End file.
